International adoption creates involuntary immigrants. Unlike the millions of others who cross borders during their lives, our migration is completely involuntary. It's not a choice we, nor our families, make. Instead, it's the adoption industry that dictates who stays in the countries we are born in and who is sent overseas. This blog chronicles how these two aspects of our lives intersect.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

We need 10,000 signatures by January. Right now there are about 400. An explanation is below.~ IAI

Russell David Green (Lim Sang Keum) was born to a Korean
mother and an American soldier and has lived in the United States for
over 30 years. He currently faces possible deportation to Korea – a
country whose language he cannot speak, and where he has no family who
recognizes him.

Russell arrived in Massachusetts from Korea as a 12-year-old boy,
but after only a few months, his “forever parents” returned him to the
adoption agency before his adoption was finalized. He was then placed
with a single foster parent living in Brooklyn, New York who exposed him
to drugs and abuse. Instead of facilitating a permanent family and home
for him as a U.S. citizen, the U.S. adoption system set him up for a
lifetime of addiction and vulnerability. It let him fall through the
cracks where he has lived under constant threat of deportation.

Russell’s story could be any intercountry adoptee’s story due to
insufficient U.S. immigration policies that fail to safeguard children’s
rights “to enter and reside permanently in the receiving State” (Hague
Convention on Intercountry Adoption article 18) and “to acquire a
nationality” (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child article 7).
Children do not immigrate to the U.S. of their own volition to be
adopted. They are transported through intercountry agreements that are
designed to ensure their best interests. Powerless, they cannot enforce
their rights and are therefore vulnerable to the neglect of a receiving
country and its adoption agencies.

Russell and other adult adoptees therefore struggle with legal
loopholes, not bad luck. Previous to the Child Citizenship Act of 2000,
adopted children were not automatically naturalized. A child immigrant
arriving to the U.S. became a permanent resident but might be rendered
stateless if the sending country revoked her/his citizenship or if
he/she was not registered in the country of origin. If the adoptee’s
status as a permanent resident was not converted to U.S. citizenship
prior to adulthood, then the adoptee could lose permanent residency for
infractions such as remaining out of the U.S. for more than 12 months or
voting in an election. Moreover, as a consequence of post-9/11 security
laws such as the REAL ID Act of 2005, adoptees who are unable to
document their identities struggle to access state-sponsored programs
and vital care.

Despite these legal entanglements, Russell’s roots in the U.S. run
deep. The U.S. is his home where his three children were born and where
an elderly couple who have known him for over 25 years regard him as
their son. To deport Russell is to break up his family, force him to
lose the only home that he has known for the vast majority of his life,
and to “return him to sender” to a country that rescinded its
obligations to him.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Back when Slumdog Millionaire became a hit, a new phrase was coined, "poverty porn." It referred to the horror enjoyed when watching wretched conditions. It also tickled people's sense of superiority. They thought, "Oh, thank god we're not like that!"

The relentless requests from adoptive parents to hear adult adoptees' stories makes me feel like they're enjoying the same kind of voyeuristic perverse pleasure in hearing how terrible things were back in the bad old days, and how much better things are now. They will listen to adult adoptees and learn. They're not going to do what our adoptive parents did, naive and as well-intentioned as they were. Adoptive Parents3.0 are going to seek out advice from adult adoptees who will relay to them stories about being the only non-white kid in school and never learning to eat with chopsticks. Then they feel better, their consciouses soothed and warned about how NOT to raise their kids, and maybe even a 10 point bullet list of how to raise a well-adjusted rainbow-family kid.

Well, no more, APs. Not from me. You're not even going to get the stories about the great things that my adoptive parents did.

Nope. Now, if you want to hear from adult adoptees, you're going to hear a lot more.

You're also going to hear my opinion about your participation in a fundamentally corrupt market for children. You're going to have to take my criticism of the adoption market which is created by adopters. That market buys and sells children for profit. You're going to read about social injustices that exploit women, poor families, and national tragedies.

You're going to find out:
I live in a neighborhood you fear.
I speak a language you ridicule.
I eat food you cannot tolerate.
I reclaim a nationality you tried to erase.
I identify as an immigrant that you hate.
I am not a white person.

Friday, November 4, 2011

I compared the total number of immigrant visas issued in 2010 to the number of adoption visas and discovered some interesting percentages of immigrants admitted to the US for adoption. Here are the top 20 countries by percentage. The ones especially interesting vis-a-vis international adoption are bold.

I hope to find the data to do more years, especially ones of peak activity from Korea, China, and Guatemala.

I'm sure that some of these are adoptions by relatives rather than brokered by the adoption industry, but I'm sure that these are insignificant in the most popular sending countries.